Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines

In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of “spiritual conquest” in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the 16th-18th centuries. By tracking the prose of spiritual conquest with the history of the mission in official documents, religious correspondence, and public controversies, the author shows how, contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, the literature and pastoral politics of spiritual conquest reinforced the frontier character of the religious provinces outside Manila in the Americas as well as the Philippines, by supplanting the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or completing it. This frontier character accounts for the modern reinvention of native custom as well as the birth of literature and theater in the Tagalog vernacular.

Blanco John :

John D. (Jody) Blanco is the author of Frontier Constitutions. He teaches early modern and modern Hispanophone and Philippine literature and culture. He also translated Julio Ramos’s book Divergent Modernities of Latin America into English. He is the Director of Latin American Studies at UC San Diego.

Honorable Mention at 2025 Best Book in Colonial Latin American Studies.

"John D. Blanco has contributed with his book to a better understanding of evangelization and the so-called civilization—more accurately a cultural intervention—carried out by Spain during three centuries of conquest and colonization. A magnificent and scholarly work of supreme importance for understanding the past and present of Filipino culture."
-Clara Herrera, Guaraguao , issue 76, 2024

“This book challenges a historiography that it describes as still characterized by John Leddy Phelan’s model of Hispanization, Christianization, and Philippinization by arguing that the legacy of Spanish missionaries was counter-Hispanization. Another powerful contribution of this book is to highlight the incomplete nature of the conquest and the massive scale of the violence and displacement caused by the Spanish invaders and the agents of their colonial administration. The book identifies the important role of missionary literature in providing a counternarrative that reveals the political and spiritual conquest as incomplete. It also sheds important light on the (largely neglected) harrowing abuses committed by missionaries against Indigenous people. … This book provides valuable insights into the complex creation of Philippine Christianity…”
-Natalie Cobo, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 2 (May 2025)